It is hard to distinguish between Production Ready and not, without signifiers, like version numbers that are above, "1", or something like that. There's always the "Just, because it's on CPAN, doesn't mean it's made of Gold" , idea - but what is? and what isn't? Sometimes it's hard to distinguish.

But a version 1.0 or above is no more reliable an indicator, I have seen lots of lumps of crap wrapped up in a bow with a big 1.0 on it and uploaded to CPAN. In the end you have to do things like; 1) ask the community 2) look for indicators like the ones I mentioned in my post (resolved bugs, nicely updated docs, etc) and finally 3) read the code and make your own judgement. In the end, it is open source, so you can always patch it and send the fix to the author, or just fork the whole module and maintain your own version.

Still, the ecological nitch is that the users don't know how to use CPAN, even if they have it available. I tear out my own hair sometimes when CPAN gets unyieldy. That's not something my users are even going to attempt.

But how is a Pure Perl version of Module::X going to make that any easier? I have had hard times installing Pure Perl modules too, it is not just C/XS based modules that cause issues.

If I could find an easy enough to use tutorial on how to do exactly that, I would - but the docs on CPAN still read as if I know what the heck I'm already doing. Perl is only user-friendly to Perl hackers, it seems. It's why people *use* php.

The PAR Tutorial is pretty good actually, and anything you don't understand you can just ask here or on IRC and I am sure you can get people to help you.

And a app packaged in PAR needs PAR to work! It's a chicken 'n egg thing again.

This is not actually true, you can tell PAR to package it all into a self contained file which only depends on itself. Look in the PAR Tutorial it specifically says "Requires only core Perl to run on the target machine".